2014-05-19

Your responsiveness to your customers’ problems is the key to sustaining your business. In the increasingly social online landscape, your virtual help desk is pushed to the forefront – out on display for all your customers, friends, fans, and followers to see. Picking the right help desk app helps you put your best face forward.

This creates an immutable demand for a reliable, responsive help desk solution to help your customers find the answers they seek. With a growing plethora of help desk offerings, it’s understandably difficult to know which one is right for you. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the eight best help desk apps around. The offerings that make our list are those trusted by some of the biggest names in various sectors of business.

Before you choose a help desk app, you owe it to yourself to compare the entries on this list, as well as their existing (and impressive) clients, to decide the right help desk software solution for your business.

Here are our top eight picks.

HappyFox

You can judge help desk software based on its existing clientage. A help desk application’s existing customer list should read like a who’s-who of industry leaders.

HappyFox is a help desk software vendor that lists major companies like Sennheiser, Whirlpool, and HULT International Business School among its many happy customers. Just take a look at the first entrant on that list, Sennheiser, on a social media site like Twitter (hashtag #Sennheiser) and you’ll be treated to a deluge of happy customers responding to a brand they obviously trust.

If a company as good at what it does as Sennheiser is turns to a help desk app, it’s worth giving it a long, hard look when it comes time to choose a help desk solution for your business.

HappyFox features:

Email ticketing system

Social media integration

Voice integration

Chat integration

Embeddable website widget

If you are ready to step up to the plate and join the ranks of HappyFox’s existing clientele – an elite group of businesses that take solving customer problems seriously, with no room to compromise – you owe it to your organization to check out HappyFox’s robust help desk software offering.

Desk.com

Again, we can look to this help desk application vendor’s who’s-who list of clients to determine just how valuable a tool the app really is.

Case in point: Disqus, a wildly popular online social commenting platform, turns to Desk.com for its help desk needs. Think about the implications of that statement. With a huge percentage of websites and blogs dependent on Disqus to facilitate social engagement, that, in turn, means all those sites ultimately depend on Desk.com.

Desk.com features:

Universal inbox

Case management

Self service sites

Productivity tools

Customer profiles

Advanced reporting

Multilingual

Mobile

Unmatched Salesforce integration

Most notably, Desk.com is a complete social customer support solution. Desk.com excels at making customer support open to anyone across your organization, allowing personnel to readily respond to customer problems as they arise.

ZenDesk

Who’s using ZenDesk?

How about gargantuan organizations like Groupon, Vodafone, Gilt, and the government of the United Kingdom, for starters.

And there’s a good reason for ZenDesk’s rampant popularity, especially among big, complex organizations. ZenDesk positions itself as a one-stop shop for customer self-service (helpful indeed, especially for businesses that field tons of customers on a daily basis). ZenDesk’s 24/7 support resources are augmented by an integrated knowledge base that’s puts customer support on autopilot.

With a user base of more than 40,000 customers worldwide, ZenDesk is one of the most popular help desk apps around.

ZenDesk features:

Flexible ticketing

Multi-channel support

Mobile support

In-app analytics

Customer-facing Web interface

Knowledge base portal

Community forums

More than 100 third-party integrations

Highly scalable

Join the many thousands of businesses that use ZenDesk to turn customer concerns into stress-free everyday occurrences with ZenDesk.

Samanage

Samanage is a cloud-based IT service desk and asset management software provider that counts among its clients IT hardware and software maker Ricoh, among many others.

Samanage is ideal for tech businesses that field routine service requests from customers. What’s more, Samanage connects your IT department with your customers, allowing fast fixes to common problems, and end-to-end troubleshooting of unexpected issues.

Samanage features:

IT service desk

IT asset management

Self-service portal

Knowledge base building

Risk detection

Mobile access

Reports and API

Problems and changes

Samanage is a standout held desk app due in large part to it being geared for the IT sector. Samanage brings your customers and your IT department closer than ever.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is in the business of delighting customers. (Sound familiar? That’s your goal too, right?)

Its outset goal: “make supporting fun”. Freshdesk fully recognizes that every help ticket a customer submits is a chance to win a customer over for life.

Freshdesk’s clients include Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Good Reads, and Unicef, among many others. (Talk about being in company, right?)

That operating principle corresponds to the governing principles of your business, no doubt. Freshdesk makes it easy to do that and to measure your success in doing so, all in one application.

Freshdesk allows you to automate your support process and deliver self-service, branded solutions to your customers that will solidify your relationships for the long term.

Freshdesk features:

Email-to-ticket conversion

Knowledge base building

Self-service portal

Service agreements

Unique “gamification” functions

Freshdesk takes the pain out of customer support – on both sides of the equation!

Kayako

Kayako is a super simple help desk app. Kayako brings together support ticketing via email, the Web, live chat, phone, and self-service ticketing. The app offers you (and more importantly, your customers) with all the support channels you’d expect

Kayako is also one of the oldest help desk software solutions, having been around since 2001. In addition to 13 years of experience, Kayako has a user base of more than 30,000 clients. Oh, and their customers? How about FedEx, NASA, and General Electric, just to name a few.

Kayako Features:

Support ticketing

Email integration

Real-time visitor monitoring

Self-service options

Definable business hours for live support options

Customizable help desk interface

Kayako is friendly and solid – just like your business!

TeamSupport

TeamSupport is all about collaborative problem solving.

If the initial support agent contacted does not have the answer, TeamSupport makes it easy for that person to find the person who does have the right answer.

TeamSupport’s list of clients includes some truly massive businesses: AT&T, Walmart, Fuji Film, Comcast, and the NBA – just to name a few.

And it’s with good reason.

TeamSupport makes it easy to sort personnel into groups and stage ad-hoc conversations around customer queries, on-the-fly.

TeamSupport features:

Collaboration-focused

Knowledge base building

Automated

Email ticketing

Live support chat

Ticket tagging

TeamSupport makes keeping customers smiling a team effort, just as it should be!

Mhelpdesk

Mhelpdesk is a help desk app with a special focus on field service management.

If your business has a team that travels (providing repairs, inspections, or other mobile services), Mhelpdesk is the solution for you.

Mhelpdesk keeps your team of problem solvers connected as they work in the field solving customer problems, and updating you, via the app, in real time.

Mhelpdesk’s customer showcase boasts everyday business owners just like you: an interior design firm, a slew of IT companies, and a guitar technician all make the list on the company’s website. All told, some 10,000 small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) turn to Mhelpdesk to keep their customers happy and keep track of their field service teams.

Mhelpdesk features:

Work order tracking

Customer relationship management

Quickbooks integration

Mobile app (iOS/Android)

Scheduling and dispatch

Estimates

In-app invoicing

Mhelpdesk lets your team go where it needs to go to keep your customers smiling!

Are you looking for the best help desk app for your business?

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